The musical equivalent of Corrie? ... Last Night of the Proms. Photograph: Joel Ryan/PA

Margaret Hodge is in fact jumping on the same rickety bandwagon that has, in recent years, been driven by Arts Council of England. The gist of the message is that, unless you can show that your audience is representative of the broad demographic of the British Isles, you are failing and your product is suspect. Sounds reasonable enough. Just utterly wrong.

Whereas Stalin believed that the arts could and should shape his brave new world, Hodge is apparently more concerned with the arts as a social barometer, showing just how well we get on with each other in an imaginary, inclusive Britain. The Arts Council tried this with a cultural diversity programme that demanded detailed profiles of audiences while threatening to penalise groups not able to deliver a self-congratulatory statistical message.

I immigrated to this country many years ago. Although the journey from Cape Town was 6,000 miles, culturally the distance was not great. It was no big deal but, all the same, I initially gravitated towards other newcomers, partly because of the logistics of hostels and social-networks, but also because being with other people like me offered some respite from being (in my case, only very slightly) different. Culture matters to people and in a new place, particularly if it is very different, the familiar often matters far more to people than it did in their country of origin. Who can blame them for clinging to it?

So can the arts help immigrant communities loosen their grasp and reach out towards integration - a process of adopting part of the culture of their new home?

Yes, but what's on offer? Corrie? How about Celebrity Big Brother or X-Factor perhaps? Or Heat magazine? Don't forget to buy your Lotto ticket and, after you've torn it up, off you go for some binge drinking to numb the sheer tedium of it all. No wonder so many newcomers to the UK turn their backs on our popular culture. It's crap. It may be beautifully produced and brilliantly marketed - after all it's not made by stupid people, only by people who think their audience is stupid - but then, as Turner prize-winner Chris Ofili, can testify, there's no disguising dung. Folk can spot it.

The fact is that if we expect people, if not to surrender their culture, to at least engage with ours, we have to have the decency to offer them something of merit. It may come as a surprise to Margaret Hodge that the kind of music the Proms presents is selling itself across the globe with very little marketing. It's doing so because that music is one of European culture's supreme achievements. That kind of quality sells itself. Granted, the Last Night may not be the Proms' finest two hours (apart from that one with the Birtwistle saxophone concerto) but it is also the only concert in the series where an overt cultural message is allowed to surface. That it is also the most popular concert (the musical equivalent of Corrie) in the series perhaps poses some interesting questions about our culture.

Margaret Hodge is right to be critical that the Proms don't appeal to a wider audience. It's outrageous. Even in other countries few people would disagree that it is the greatest music festival in the world and, as arts minister, she should be singing the praises of something that is British and world-class. If that doesn't work, she could try giving them extra money specifically to market themselves to all the people she doesn't see there. Or maybe she should just resign. That would probably be best.